Last days, disconnected observations

There's only a couple days left before mom gets here and we go on our tourism adventures, which should in themselves be fun and informative, but right now I just want to tie up any loose ends and enjoy the people I've gotten to know here. And get through my finals.

I feel like there's so much I haven't experienced about Cairo, but at the same time it's important to acknowledge what I have done. I still need to go shopping in the infamous Khan al-Khalili market, though I have made it to "City Stars," the monstrously large, international style mall here. I haven't done much in the way of anthropological research, but I have had several meetings with my Anthro professor here, and I have a deep respect for him. I still haven't seen "Girls and Motorcycles," and Egyptian movie that looks too inappropriate to have made it into theaters in this fairly conservative country (which is exactly why I need to see it)--but on the other hand I saw Heena Maisara, another Egyptian movie on poverty in Cairo and ways that peoples lives can go right or wrong here. And I saw that movie with my roommate and some friends of hers, and it was interesting to see much a movie about Cairo could surprise and open the eyes of people from Cairo. I haven't gone to mosques during worship or talked to too many people about their faith, but I have visited many stunningly beautiful mosques with my architecture class, and saw examples of how people live as Muslims from my classmates, my professors, and my host family.

So before I start in on adventures with mom (and I'm really glad that we're doing that, because 1.) it'll distract me from being sad that people are leaving and 2.) I do want to see this other side of Egypt and 3.) it gives me a little transition time between AUC being over and the moment when I actually leave Egypt, because otherwise they kick us out of the dorms as soon as final are over and before we possibly could have a chance to catch our breath...and 4.) I'll have no excuse not to shop for people which I haven't really done yet and which could be fun), which hopefully I'll document on this blog as best as possible ان شاء الله (God willing), I want to get in a couple more observations and anecdotes.

February involved a lot of getting used to school here and hanging out with different people. In March I retreated to my room and hung out with Enas a lot, worked on homework, the Lily grant and finding an apartment. I was gearing up, in April, for spring break and then actually going on it, and in May I think I struck a better balance with going out and getting work done, as well as striking a balance between spending time with people I care about deeply here and people who I like to hang out with just for fun.

One day in the beginning of April I heard an Egyptian guy on campus playing the oud (عود-picture stolen from http://shafisaid.wordpress.com/2007/05/31/for-the-love-of-oud/), which I think is a very important instrument in Arab music--but since it was college students he wasn't playing some traditional tune. He was playing the theme from "Pulp Fiction" ("Misirlou" by Dick Dale and His Del-Tones?) on an Arab musical scale. It was hott.

I've continued loving the Egyptian coffeehouses (though "house" seems like an overstatement) and going every once in a while. There are a couple near campus, and a guy friend of mine from Architecture of Cairo class will go in the mornings before class or fieldtrips. I wouldn't go to these places unaccompanied or even without someone male--there's no threat, it's just very palpably a man's world and I need some XY genes along to legitimate my presence there. Usually Sam and I get "take away" but a couple times we've sat and taken our time over a Turkish coffee after class. In early March (which means warm weather here), we took some homework one day to the 'ahwa and were in no rush. We wound up getting into a conversation, entirely in Arabic (me with my paltry Colloquial and Sam, who's only taken formal, newscaster Arabic) with the older men who frequent these places. We just talked about the different names of the drinks served there, what they are made of, the names of the different parts of the water pipes they smoke. But it was neat. People here are comfortable talking to people they don't know--a clerk in a store will comment on something funny to a customer if he notices it, or vendors will gently tease us about our Arabic. Egypt is a good place for joking around.

I don't want to stereotype or generalize, but I do want to try to articulate how it's different from the US. I think that people don't cop an attitude with each other here. If you address someone on the street, there's never a sense of, "Why are you talking to me?" or of people assuming that you're stupid or that your question/comment was unnecessary or obvious. I mean, they're not saints; people get into explosive fights when someone hits their car, but there's an 'innocent until proven guilty' attitude toward others that strikes me as constrasting a coldness and suspicion in the US. That said, I love the US, I'm so excited to get back, really looking forward to feeling comfortable and like I know what's going on. I'm excited to try myself treating people back home in this less suspicious, more friendly way, and I'm sure it will fly there too.

I've noticed that couples seem to genuinely enjoy other, and whenever you see them, they're always in dialogue, back and forth between the man and the woman. I would have said that this is like the US, but when ever I see it here, it always amazes me and looks like a phenomenon I've never seen before. I'll have to people watch back home more to see if this is true, but no matter the age of the couple, they always seem to be on good terms, respectful and interested in what the other has to say. This has been my experience of my host family as well, though, so maybe those two ideas are related.

I've become a little disillusioned with looking or acting or being cool. Everyone has their own definition of cool, of course, but even my own definitions of things I find interesting and intriguing about other people seem really unimportant sometimes. How much better to be good, or respectful, or respectable. This has to do with the AUC Gucci posing (how can there be so many girls in skinny leg jeans?), but also with people I've met and gotten to know, and the cool ones...either I don't feel a gut connection to them, or I eventually have to admit to myself that they aren't as interesting as, say, the people who I orginally found to be less cool, but who are earnest, or who are deeply humorous.

In the past couple months, I've gotten really close to my roommate Enas. I've divulged the secrets of American dating culture to her, she talked me through a small social crisis, and she's basically amazing. She cares about me and thinks that my flaws and faux pas are funny, and I try to watch out for her. I love her sense of humor--light, sarcastic, yet deeply funny. She says that her life isn't very interesting, but just because she manages to avoid drama and doesn't have a lot of embarrassing stories does not prevent her from being delightful company. Before a couple months ago, she had never seen a drunk person, and was very curious about it. I told her she wasn't missing out on anything, but since she's lived in Muslim countries where alcohol is limited to a very few shady spots, she hasn't had the demystifying experience of seeing drunken people on the street or particularly on college campuses. So when a couple of the American kids from the dorm had gone out and gotten a little buzzed, I sent her in their direction to say hi. And I accompanied her to a party that reminded me a lot of high school when people's parents were out for the weekend (and I would sit in the corner, drinking a can of Coke and hoping my friends would be ready to leave soon). Unsurprisingly, drunkness wasn't as neat, or as debilitating, as she thought it might be, and now she wants to avoid drunks as much as possible. So I feel like she's had a good introduction to it. Also amusingly, she asked me the other day if I use laundry paper, and it took us a really long time to realize that she was talking about dryer sheets. But really, her English is impeccable (though lamentably British in vocabulary sometimes, because of her grammar school education)--I think I've mentioned before that she even curses well in English, which I learned in linguistics class is one of the grammatically most complicated parts of the language which students of a language usually can't ever do as well as native speakers.

Last Thursday, I went to a lecture that was like Introduction/Politics of Bollywood, which was pretty informative since I know basically nothing about this industry that apparently has an audience of like half of the entire world. But it also reminded me of something I've been noticing all spring--that contemporary South Asia and the Middle East are much more connected than I'd realized. One of my closest friends here is an American girl whose family is from Bangladesh, and she points out similarities between Arabic and Bengali language, as well as correcting me whenever I call certain foods "Middle Eastern," because she says they originated closer to her homeland. Another friend of mine here says that parts of Cairo look a lot like his native India, and when Enas went to visit my host family with me, she said their neighborhood reminded her of her trip to India. Enas is also familiar with Bollywood movies (and commands a wicked--in both senses of the word--Indian acccent) and that's not unusual here. Attention to Bollywood is surely growing in the US, but it's still pitifully limited. Realizing that my country manages to basically ignore something that's pervasive in so much of the rest of the world is interesting both because it shows me, once more, how much bigger the world is than how I think about it, and that Americans, who say that the world is "shrinking" and that we're more connected everyday, are still insulated from certain unfamiliar forms.

Also, trying to describe the culture and experience of being here as made me much more sure that there's no way I could ever be an anthropologist. Just describing the difference between a normal street around my host family's apartment vs. a normal street in the neighborhood where the dorm is-- that seems daunting to the point of impossible. They're vastly different, but I'd need a boatload of insight to be able to explain how.

Yerushalayim!

My homestay added a whole new level of poverty to my vision of Egypt. The family had their own apartment, with 6 beds for 8 people, and could feed their 6 children well. The three oldest all worked, and the three youngest were in grammer and middle school. One of the older boys is an engineer, the other in school to be a family councelor but drives a small, 3-wheeled taxi called a tuktuk, and the older daughter works as a translator and secretary--so by any country's standards, they're doing well. But each of the family members has about 2 outfits that they wear outside the house. Now, those outfits range from neat to nice-looking, but imagine having only two changes of clothes. Once they get back to the house, the women change into galabeyas (loose dresses). Getting a big bottle of Sprite to share after dinner was a treat, and we would share bowls at dinner, though not forks, since they were concerned with cleanliness. They were sad that I was leaving them for Jerusalem, but as soon as I get a chance I'll go back to visit, because they're just such a wonderful family.

The first thing that struck my sleep deprived brain after the 15 hour trek from Cairo to the Holy City was boys with earrings and women looking pretty and not feeling bad about it. Israel is so not Egypt. It's not as if you've taken something out of Europe and dropped it in the Mid East, but it is a Western country. And the tacky souveniers here--much nicer and more tasteful than their counterparts in Egypt. The buildings only a couple stories, which creates a much different look than Cairo's predominant apartment towers. And that white stone they use everywhere here...cement can't possibly compete as a building material. It's just lovely here--I'm thinking of extending my stay. I should probably be doing the good little anthropological thing and describing more details, but I want to tell stories about my adventures.

Saturday was day two in J'lem, but my first full day here. While I was eating the YMCA's continental breakfast and reading the Bible, I noticed an old man at the next table looking over at me. I was super nervous, but I took a chance and went over to his table and said hello. He didn't seem surprised or confused at why I was speaking to him, and we wound up talking for over an hour about a lot of things--my education (hooray, someone who believes in liberal arts and studying abroad simply to make yourself a better, more educated person!), religion (I think he'd been looking over because I'd been reading, and he's an atheist and wondered what was going through my mind), ourselves (I described the AUC jaunt and he described coming as a baby from Austria to Israel). It was really great, and I felt very blessed to have gotten to talk to him. After this, I thought I'd go find an internet cafe in the Old City and email my advisor. I found one, though to get into the Old City I had to flash my American passport and tell the police that I was just trying to get to my hostel (when I'm actually at the Y outside the old city) but I naively thought that I'd go say Hi to my AUC friends who were planning on staking out a space in Holy Sepulchre for the service of the Holy Fire. I should have realized that there were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people trying to get into Holy Sepulchre at for that same service. That was the reason there was a police barrier. But I started going toward the church, and then I got swept up in the crowds, and then suddenly I was in the church, and I didn't know what to do or where to go look for them. But I knew I was in a desirable place, so I sat down against a wall for a while, staking my claim on a little floorspace. But then the police/Israeli army decided that the hall I was in was not allowed to have people in it, at least not yet, so they forced everyone down some stairs into a chamber without any other exit. They were pushing very roughly, including all the old ladies and being scary. I later found that we had been sent down into the Armenian chapel. There were maybe 300-400 people down there; it wasn't crowded, and it wasn't as hot as upstairs, but I was stuck. Between the soldiers and the pilgrims crowding the stairs, there was no way I wasn't going to be staying for the service. I didn't really know what it involved, and everyone around me was Orthodox, meaning mostly from countries where they don't speak English. So I napped a little, did a little homework. After 2 or 3 hours of waiting, there were noises of excitement from upstairs, and all of down in that room crowded toward the stairs, people holding their bundles of 33 candles in the air, ready to receive the Holy Fire. And then we waited for maybe another hour, with moments of noise from upstairs getting people all exicted down stairs. But finally there was cheering from upstairs, and a bell started ringing. From mass this semester, I've learned that chimes indicate the miracle of transsubstantiation, and I knew that the bell meant that the priest had come out of the tomb with the miraculous fire sent by God. I was so excited along with the other pilgrims, and when the fire finally made it down to us, I was crying and laughing because it was so beautiful and wonderful.

People passed the fire around, and then passed their hands through it, for blessings I guess, and then put out the candles. I didn't have any candles, but some people let me put my hands over their flames. People said it wasn't as hot as regular fire; maybe. God was very present in that moment, as He has been for me since the beginning of this trip. When we made it out of the church, I went and bought some candles to light later. The size of the flame from all the candles bundled together was very big, and when people had been carrying it around, it made my think of God's flame in my heart, and how seeing a fire that I could imagine sitting in my chest and burning was very inspiring.

I found a felafel place and had lunch, with my third Turkish coffee here finally being the most like they have in Egypt. Now I'm worried I won't be able to find it in the US--I don't want espresso or something that tastes like regular black coffee grounds sitting unfiltered in the bottom of my cup. Anyway, I got a little work done there, and as I was setting out once again to find that internet cafe, who comes down the street by my friends from AUC. So I went off with them as they got lunch at an Arab restaurant, and then we went back to Holy Sepulchre, where the Orthodox kids explained some things to the Protestant kids. So we touched the annointed stone where Christ's body was laid before he was put in the tomb, and we prayed, and saw the rock that the cross stood on. While we were at the cross rock, a priest was fixing a chandelier with oil lamps, and he moved his ladder too quickly and one of the lamps fell to the floor and smashed. So since Al, who's like non-denominational/Protestant, and I were in the mood of venerating objects in holy places and being open to signs, we went and picked up a piece of the lamp and put our fingers in the oil. It wasn't super meaningful, but it couldn't hurt.

Also, people were lined up to go in the Sepulchre itself and ligth their candles from the Holy Fire. We didn't go in, but I got my candles lit from someone who had just walked out of the tomb with the fire, before he put his out in this little cone next to the exit. I feel like I'm forgetting something else that happened, but we visited the chapels next to Holy Sepulchre--the one on the right was Ethiopian, very solemn.

We spent a little time in the hostel where my friends are staying and then, 12 hours after I had originally set off looking for an Internet cafe, I finally landed in one and was able to get some work done. I had carried my laptop around the entire day--my headphone and microphone had unsurprisingly broken at some point. It's hard that God is not interested in my deadlines and the things I feel obligated to do--when there is a spiritual experience for me to have, God never looks at my calendar to make sure it's convenient for me. Actually, the hard part about that is saying, "No, today I'm going to stay away from people or places who I feel God is drawing me to, because I have a paper due tomorrow and I'm going to make that a priority." But hopefully I'm answering a larger calling by investing in my education, even if the immediacy of a spriritual experience beckons more forcefully than meeting a deadline I've committed to. I think that if I strike a balance between the two, I'll be good. I certainly feel the need to justify fulfilling my obligations when the alternative is Jerusalem out there waiting for me.

Weekend plans

Easter weekend my travel plans (Jerusalem, anyone?) fell through, so I stayed at the dorms and am planning to go to the Holy Land for Eastern Easter, with a kid I met here who's Greek Orthodox. So I staying in Cairo and worked on my grant proposal for this summer (!!!) and did some little things. One morning I hung around the room of some friends of mine who are roommates (Hala, who's Palestinian, and Jessica, who's American) and Hala made us Turkish coffee and we sat on their balcony. Turkish coffee, Hala explained to us, is not like a cup of American coffee--it's not to be drunk on the run, and you drink it in company. Hanging out with them was lovely and probably the highlight of the weekend.

Because I stayed in a lot, I felt kind of disconnected from Egypt and being here during the week following Easter, and I was trying to just wrap up a couple assignments so I stayed in and just went between the dorms and campus. The weekend following was nice, and I feel back on track as far as trying to engage with the culture and the people I meet. I went with some friends (mix of Americans and Arabs) to "Islamic Cairo", which is a touristy market in the midst of important Islamic buildings that are about a thousand years old. We went to a park...which is not a common or natural occurrence on the Cairo landscape. It was huge, green, lit up after the sun went down and was full of young happy Egyptians. Afterwards, Enas (my roommate) and I were going to go home and do homework, but then decided since it was a Friday night to give it one more hour (we're such wild girls; we stay out until 8:45) and go on with the group to an Egyptian coffee-and-hookah cafe called an "'ahwa," which is one of the richest, simplest pleasures for me here. It was even better because I've been buckling down on homework and Grinnell requirements recently, so I haven't gone to one of these places in 3-4 weeks. I love Turkish coffee and باشرب شيشة احيانا and the atmosphere is so relaxed and social and unrushed. It's always mostly older and middle aged Egyptian men at the other tables, and they're interested in talking to their friends and drinking their tea or coffee, just like we are. The best 'ahawi (plural of 'ahwa) in my opinion have been in alleys between other buildings, so it's like there are walls on two sides but you're open to the air above and there's thoroughfare and activity at either end of the "premises." Chris called while we were at this 'ahwa, so I got to talk to him a little--the best of both worlds.

Saturday was also an out and about day, with an architectural field trip to some early Muslim shrines and religious schools. I've started asking my architecture professor more questions about Islam, and it's great to talk to her because she's so smart and knowledgeable. I asked some questions about fatwa-s and the mufti (apparently there is one for Egypt, but a group--دار--of scholars here who discuss that kind of religious interpretations stuff) because we had discussed it in my Anthropology class Thursday. There's so much interesting stuff about Islam that I don't know anything about!

I had my first Formal Arabic (aka Modern Standard Arabic aka فصحى) lesson Saturday, which I'm getting through a language school downtown separate from AUC that a friend here recommended. It felt really good to be doing some formal study again, and I don't think it'll be nearly as hard to move between Formal and Colloquial as I thought. Enas has it down and knows which words are formal and which are colloquial and which are both, so why can't I? I'm managing, on the low level of Arabic that I do have under my belt. Immediately after the Formal lesson, I had a talkative cab driver back to the dorms, so no threat of loosing my colloquial. I still don't have a good answer to the question of what I'm going to do with my Arabic. But I like languages too much to just let learning them turn into a personal passtime.

More observations

. أنا مبسوطة في مصر Ana mabsuta fi Masr. I am happy in Egypt. Let me describe a day. I drink Turkish coffee, sweet and spicy, in the morning out of a dirty styrofoam cup handed to me by an old man who supplies other old men with Turkish coffee and hookah all day here and who charges me 1LE or about 0.18USD for it. I eat a breakfast of soft, delicious flatbread with fig jam, from a window staffed by about 4 guys who I know didn't wash their hands before they started work this morning. I walk to class in the street between lanes of moving cars with the exhast and pollution swirling around me as I weave around groups of staring young men. I carry my coffee extra carefully because I'll need every drop to keep me awake today--I stayed out until 5am the night before with my roommate and some of our friends, talking and walking around the neighborhood and eating "second dinner" at 3 in the morning. I can smell the cigarette smoke my clothes and sometimes I can't get the second hand hookah smoke out of my nose for hours, and I love it here. I'm so excited about coming home in June, and I'm so excited about being here right now. I can legitimately say that I'm not stressed, which I can never say at Grinnell. Inconveniences that would bother me back home roll off my back. Am I productive academically? No! Am I busy squeezing everything I could possibly get out of my time here? No! I am leisurely sipping from the cup of my time here.

I sleep crazy hours, but that's okay here. I stayed up until 4 one morning studying, but I was down in the lobby and there were a bunch of other students there too the whole time. Some were studying, others were socializing, others were just playing around on their laptops. It wasn't a big deal to stay up that late; it's like all hours of the day and night are opened up to be inhabited. Some Egyptian kids here have told me that they stay up all night sometimes for no reason and think nothing of it. Sure, they're tired, but malesh (the catchall for "I'm sorry or too bad but don't worry about it because it's not a big deal, whatever"). They can catch up during the next morning or evening.

I'm not sure how long this attitude or lifestyle can last--there's a lot I want to read, for example, and I actually have time to do it here--but this past couple weeks have been very chill and good fun. It's how I would arrange the most perfect vacation--sometimes there's work to be done, but you're surrounded by students, American and otherwise, who are interested enough in the world to care about studying here, but who have time to hang out and do nothing and enjoy each other's company.

For the record I've been drinking small quantities of tap water as of week four, and I've been fine. I must have intestines of steel, because I've eaten pretty much everything I've laid eyes on here and I only feel sick when I over-indulge on Nutella.

There are times I'm hanging out with girls from Arab countries and the conversation will turn down a route that I feel I don't really need to be paying attention to, and it's only tonight that I realized there's something worth mentioning about these moments. I get bored when girls are talking about their crushes, or when my roommate talks with other RA's (yeah, Residence Advisors) about RA politics and whether so-and-so responded inappropriately to such-and-such RA crisis. I tend to allow myself to zone out when these conversations are happening because I tell myself, "This isn't Egyptian--this is just like back home." But, of course, that's stupid. Conversations about crushes or inner-organizational politics are normal--or at least among the upper/middle class girls that I hear having these conversations. There's nothing American about them, or if there is, there's certainly nothing anti-Egyptian because they're happening in Egypt between Egyptians. They're mundane sorts of conversations, and I may not be taking in huge amounts of cultural knowledge from being privy to them because they're personal conversations, not cultural. And that's life--just because it's not a culturally rich moment doesn't mean I should ignore it.

Chris asked about Egyptian men's staring, and there's not much to explain about that. White girls and even non-Egyptian girls of all stripes stand out--even the girls whose parents are Egyptian but who grew up in the States. Egypt gets a lot of tourists, but that doesn't make people any less curious about us. Little kids walk by and say, "Hello, what is your name?" in English and then run away, shy. Men stare, and for those who didn't know, American women have an international reputation not of independence or free-siritedness or high education, but as being loose women. I saw an Egyptian man come up to a blond friend of mine and strike up a conversation by asking if she was married and putting a hand on her thigh. And girls, say from Jordan or Lebanon, have a similar reputation, apparently with the added threat of, "You're Arab so you're one of our women so I have some authority over you." A Palestinian friend of mine says that she's at a disadvantage because Egyptian girls are taught to be tough and can handle these situations. I don't get as much attention as other female students here do, but it comes my way. It's arbitrary of how you dress too, and maybe even of how beautiful you are. One solution is to take control of the situation with a firm, "Asalaamu aleikum," which is a respectful, somewhat religious greeting, and sets a tone in which ogling isn't okay. I do this when I'm walking at night, for example with police officers, who are high on the list of offenders because they have nothing better to do.

There are police officers on every corner practically, particularly in Zamalek (my neighborhood) where there are a lot of foreigners. There are a lot of underemployed people here, like the two guys whose job it is to open the door for you a Cinnabon. And then there'll be five guys working behind the counter, with one cash register and one oven. Underemployment is better than unemployment, but there's plenty of that too.

My roommate is teaching me to order in--the Arab students here don't go out to eat like the American students tend to, even if they wind up spending the same amount of money. Everywhere here delivers. If you want something like groceries or office supplies, the answer is, "Go to Metromart or Alfamart," which are Western style grocery stores. Study-abroads buy food on the street, which Egyptian students think is weird of them. My classmates eat at McDonalds and dress like US-ers (the school uniform appears to be hipster-preppy with the occassional higab, or head scarf, thrown in and sometimes the headscarf will be Louis Vuitton or Gucci) but they aren't as much like us as they seem; this comes out in our different points of reference. They speak great English, but then some don't know what a trumpet is, and the region I know as "Israel" or "Israel and Palestine" is always "Palestine." A couple Americans have said if you want to experience the different side of a country, the most distinctive and seemingly "Egyptian" part of the culture, the least international and the most domestic and traditional, you go to the poor, and you see how they live. That's certainly not the kids we go to school with. Because study abroads like exploring and going out (again, not a money thing but a getting-to-know-Cairo thing, because "going out" is often to cheap places), they know the neighborhood better than full time students. I have postulated with a couple American girls here that this has some deep, social implications or is a sign of larger things. Primarily, it means that people with money here never see or interact with people without money here. Perhaps this means that those who have the capital to take a bite out of poverty aren't informed enough about it to take action. Or perhaps the poverty here is so enormous--in the difference between rich and poor and the number of people who are in need--that it is actually too vast and twisted to be impacted. But I feel like there's something weird at hand when most AUC students don't know the restaurants around campus that are even a single block off the street that connects classroom buildings. Even on said street, there's a place study abroad students go that we call "Magic Window" where you can get Egyptian felafel for 0.75 LE or about 14 American pennies. And my roommate has never been. This is a half block past the last classroom building on the main drag. But the people jostling in line with American students for refried beans and felafel (فول وطعمية) are the Egyptians who labor in the area. Even this small contact increases awareness, I think. Which I guess should make me rethink where I go in the US. Generally, I think that the poorest places are considered unsafe, and here if you go to the poorest places of the city, people will ask what you're doing there or what you're doing, so it's not right to go if you have no business there.

Some notes on Arabic

My ability to comunicate with non-English speakers here is miniscule, but vastly improved from when I first arrived. Hardly anything I learned in class back home helps, as far as vocabulary goes. I can recognize the letters of the alphabet, which is good, and I've probably got better instincts about grammar. I'm in a colloquial class here and I love it. It's so helpful, and I'm functional in very simple economic transactions like buying a toothbrush or changing money. But I love it--I love learning Arabic, and I know I'm getting better.

I was a little set back this morning about my Arabic. I finally found someone selling American coffee at a kiosk on campus, and I was so excited. It's instant coffee, but it's not as bad as instant coffee in the US, and it's cheap. If you walk into a cafe, you can't just ask for a coffee here, because coffee is much more complex. I have not yet ventured into the vast, spicy land of espresso. When I order "'ahwa americkia," I still have to wait the same amount of time as if they were making me espresso, because "'ahwa americkia" here is a single shot of espresso...plus enough hot water to fill up the rest of the cup. It actually tastes pretty similar, I'm sorry to say. BUT, so, I found this lady on campus with her Nescafe instant coffee, and I tried to ask her if this coffee was available all day long, everyday. I thought that I had constructed a decent sentence, but when I opened my mouth to say it, this horrible, nearly unintelligible accent came out. It was so Englishy that it was not Arabic, and she had no idea what I was saying. Luckily, she managed to communicate that the coffee will always be there for me. And I'm chalking my inability to speak up to the fact that it was early in the morning, and the coffee I was clutching possessively had not yet taken effect.

One of the biggest things that throws me off here is the Egyptian "word" for "yeah." As in English, where "yeah" sounds like a derivative of "yes," the Egyptian transformation from yes to yeah is ايوة (which sounds like Iowa, or more precisely "eye-wa") to او (which sounds like "o"). The part where I get caught up is inflection, because the tone in which you say او is highly reminscent of the way you'd say, "Oh," in an English speaking country when you're surprised. Except there's a very specific, consistent way that people say او here, which is specifically, consistently reminiscent of the way that a native English speaker would say, "Oh," immediately after they've been told, for the first time, some detail that is small but vaguely disappointing. Like if you found out that you had to change your traveller's cheques tomorrow instead of today, but you knew you had enough cash to get through today, then you might respond, "Oh, well then, I guess I'll do it tomorrow." I know this seems small, but this sound has a very clear and singular meaning in the US, and I never realized how such a small detail could make such a difference. But I was completely thrown off when I first heard او in my Arabic class--I would ask the professor a question to double-check some detail, and she would say, "Oh," in such a way, with that slightly descending tone, that I thought she was compassionately surprised by how inaccurate my understanding of the deatil was. But then she would begin to move on with the lesson--I was preparing for her to correct me, and she thought she had just affirmed that I had it right! I think it's for this reason that most of the American students here stick with ايوة.

Successes in Arabic so far include talking a little bit to one of female guards at the dorm, who's younger than me and very sweet and understanding of my inability to speak, and she has enough English to understand me when I have to give up on expressing myself in Arabic. Also, last night in the cab back from school, I managed to talk to our driver a little bit, with a great deal of help from Enas, my roommate. I conveyed on my own to him that I thought Egyptians are great drivers. I didn't try to explain that I think that because I know that Americans driving here would get in so many crashes--people ignore the painted lines on the road because you can fit more cars in a given space that way, and there aren't really traffic lights. I'm much calmer when an Egyptian driver is 3/4 inch away from another driver (no exaggeration) than when I'm in a car with an American driver a foot away from another car. They do it all the time here, and they crash about as often as we do.

People here speak so clearly--even if I don't know any of the words they're saying as they pass me on the street, I can tell exactly where each word stops and the next begins. This is very different from my experiences of native speakers of Spanish, even in Costa Rica where people spoke so slowly and clearly compared to how I hear native speakers of Mexican Spanish in Chicago.

The Egyptian students here are almost universally masters of the English language, including slang and how to curse and other complicated, esoteric uses of my native tongue. However, when they speak to each other, it's in Arabic with only an occassion sprinkling of English. This is good for me learning more Arabic, but socially I'm not quite sure of how to deal with the language barrier. If I'm in a group of only Arabic speakers, I'll sometimes look away from whoever's speaking so as to not make them feel self-conscious about using Arabic which obviously excludes me. I manage to get some of the jokes anyway, but all my meaningful conversations here have so far been with American students. Well, I take that back. My roommate is awesome, and we talk about below-the-surface stuff sometimes. In English, obviously.